by Ali Dean
Grace puts down her menu. “It’s like he turns into another person when he steps on stage. You know, like a superhero who gets their powers when they put on their mask.”
After a waiter comes to take our order, I turn in my seat to find Tanner walking up a few steps to the platform, acoustic guitar in hand. He’s confident and casual, no sign of nerves or discomfort, even though he blushed furiously a minute ago simply from accidental eye contact. I’m sure I’m not the only one sighing at the sight of him.
The band before him was mellow and provided background music while folks ate and drank. As soon as Tanner walks on stage, it’s impossible for him to remain background entertainment. He introduces himself and briefly explains that the band who was on the calendar got sick and he’s here to replace them.
When he starts playing his guitar, I don’t recognize the tune. It’s a combination of notes that cuts through the air, resonating beneath the skin. The conversations at the tables around us quiet, and the rumble of voices across the village dwindles to silence. I’m not the only one entranced.
That’s before Tanner strikes with his voice. Holy shit. I’ve heard him sing before, dozens of times. It’s strong and smooth, a sexy blend of warmth and roughness. But this? This makes something within me rumble in response. It makes my mouth water and my muscles weak. I find myself leaning forward, closer, and it seems like everyone else is doing the same. The music is so rich, it practically has a taste. I breathe in the sound and it wraps around me. My hands rub together in reflex, trying to touch and feel Tanner’s voice, the notes his fingers make on the guitar. My entire being wants to get closer to the music.
Closer to Tanner.
Chapter Eight
Tanner
She was doing yoga in the living room when I got there on Sunday morning. Grace and Morgan were on mats beside her, and they were following the moves of a lady on the TV.
Charlie twisted into a side plank and raised her free arm and leg in the air, eyes on the ceiling. She was facing away from me, in nothing but a sports bra and spandex shorts. As she held the position, I tried to take steadying breaths. My hands shook, not from the weight of the box I was carrying, but from desire to run them along all the exposed skin. Blood was rushing from my head and I knew if I didn’t look away soon, my athletic shorts would do nothing to hide what Charlie did to me. Closing my eyes, I placed the box on the ground and leaned forward, hoping to cool off. But the curve of her ass in those shorts, her smooth back, the angles of her arm and leg muscles, they continued to assault me.
“Oh hey! You’re here,” Charlie called. I picked the box back up and held it strategically in front of me as I faced her.
“Sorry, I didn’t think you’d be here so early,” she apologized as she walked toward me.
“I packed most of my stuff up yesterday so figured I’d get an early start bringing it over today.”
It was barely eight in the morning, but when we talked for a few minutes last night at the mountain, she’d said to come anytime.
“Let me put on some shoes and a shirt and I’ll help you.”
Yes, please. I did not pick the best shorts to have you walking around in that outfit all day.
“That’s okay, I interrupted your yoga.” Grace and Morgan were doing the side plank facing us now and waved when I looked their way.
“It’s almost done, and I always skip the part where you lie on your back doing nothing at the end anyway. Did you bring Meatball?”
“I thought I’d get him tonight so he’s not in the way as I move stuff.”
We heard a bark from the back porch and Donut’s head and front paws popped up in the window.
“He thought yoga was wrestling time so we had to put him outside.”
It didn’t take long to unload my stuff. Since I wasn’t planning on staying long, I’d agreed to use the furniture Mia left behind instead of taking it all out and replacing it with my own. I’d moved the things in the cottage I wasn’t using into the hay barn until I bought my own place.
I’d been so caught up in hiding my writing that I hadn’t thought much about my music. It wasn’t a secret, but I liked to practice my own songs without an audience. I played almost every night, so I’d have to drive back to the barn for that.
Morgan and Grace helped too and it was weird having three women touching all my stuff. Most of it was in boxes, but since I never brought women to my cottage and rarely had visitors, their hands on my things left me with a tickling sensation. It got under my skin, but it wasn’t a bad thing. It might have even felt good, but I wasn’t sure.
I could hear the three women talking downstairs and the smell of what had to be Hilda’s blackberry pancakes wafted up. I was unpacking, trying to focus on where to put things instead of second guessing myself about this move like I had been doing all week. It was too late for that.
Hanging out with Charlie, Mia and Jamie last Sunday had been… trippy. It was so normal and fun, and I’d laughed more in a couple hours than I had all summer. Usually after being with people I was anxious to get back to my solitude, my music, my words, my characters. And when I woke up Monday morning, I’d done just that. It was what I knew, and it was comfortable.
But being with Charlie, it bridged this gap between solitude – filled with words and notes and worlds made up in my mind – and reality. I was torn because I was drawn to her, to this reality filled with sensations I’d only known when I’d found words to describe intense emotions, or by putting together the perfect harmony. Having those things play out in front of me, around me, within me, it was exhilarating. Freeing. And disconcerting. I wasn’t the only one writing this story or composing the music. I couldn’t know what any of the characters would do next. Hell, I didn’t even know what I was going to do lately.
For instance, right now. I could close my door and hole up in here for the rest of the day. Finish unpacking, start writing. But instead, I found myself walking downstairs and taking a seat on the empty stool.
“Want some?” Charlie put a plate of pancakes in front of me before I could answer.
“Sure, thanks.” Not wanting to come off as a mooch my first day as her roommate, I offered to make dinner tonight. What was I doing? Tanner Moon didn’t do things like this. At least not the guy in the story for the past thirty years. Then again, he also had never been roommates with a woman, any woman, but certainly not the one in his daydreams.
“Sure! You don’t have to though. We’re about to head to Costco and I was going to get a bunch of premade meals for the week. It makes it easier since work is super busy this time of year for me.”
“Costco? You’re going all the way to Burlington for groceries?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never been to Costco.” Morgan pointed a fork at me. “You wouldn’t be questioning the drive if you had.”
“I’ve never been to Costco.” I didn’t think this was a shameful admission until all three women gasped.
Grace peered at me. “Are you morally against it?”
I chuckled because she seemed genuinely curious. “No.”
“I heard there were a lot of protests against Walmart opening its first store in Vermont,” she explained. “That was before I moved here.”
“Oh yeah, Vermonters are anti-big-box stores. We like our mom and pops. Weren’t we the last state in the nation to get a Walmart?”
“We were.” Charlie was still standing up, and I remembered she barely sat when I was over on Sunday too. The woman did not like to slow down.
“Well, I’m all for supporting local businesses and keeping strip malls to a minimum,” Morgan declared. “But I’ll make an exception for Costco any day.”
“I wouldn’t mind a Target either.” Grace tilted her head to the side, thoughtful. “As long as Vermont keeps the no billboard rule. I’m not looking to change Vermont’s personality or anything, but sometimes I feel like I’m missing an important part of the American experience if I don’t blow my paycheck at Target on a regula
r basis.”
The front door opened and Jamie and Mia joined us in the kitchen a moment later.
“We’re still going to Costco, right?” Mia asked. “Oh, hey Tanner.”
“Hey.”
“We’re going. Is your dad letting us borrow his minivan?” Charlie asked.
Mia nodded as Jamie inspected the remaining stack of pancakes on the counter. “Blackberry lemon pancakes?”
“Yep. Hilda’s recipe. Want some?”
“I’m good. We just ate and I’m trying to work up an appetite for the Costco samples. And man, how long will it take before I get all of Hilda’s recipes?”
“I’ve got most of them,” Mia told Jamie. “I have them all in a little recipe book.”
Charlie glanced at me and smirked.
“You haven’t shared this book with me?” Jamie accused.
“I think it’s in one of the kitchen cupboards. But you have the ones she’s given you all on display, I didn’t want my book to get in the middle of that relationship.”
“He has a Hilda-recipe shrine,” Charlie loud-whispered in my direction.
“You coming with us, Tanner?” Jamie asked.
Before I could answer, Charlie, Morgan and Grace all jumped in. “You should come!”
“You have to come.”
“He’s a Costco virgin, we need to pop his cherry.” That was from Charlie, and had my neck heating as a blush took over.
“We should take two cars anyway,” Mia said. “There would barely be room for all the groceries with five us in the minivan. Now with six of us, we can justify taking two.”
Since the decision had been made on my behalf, and I couldn’t find it in me to protest, I offered my truck. There was only a bench seat in front, but I had plenty of space for groceries in the bed.
While the bench could fit three if we squeezed, it ended up being just me and Charlie alone for the forty-five-minute drive.
“So, you have to have a membership to Costco to shop there,” she explained. “Today you can be my guest. But only two people can use one membership.” I listened to her chatter, surprised at how comfortable I was being alone in an enclosed space with her like this.
“Grace and Morgan share a membership. Jamie’s only been with us once before. He was a Costco virgin too. Did you know he’d barely ever been to the grocery store before he moved here?”
“He lived in the city most of his life, didn’t he?”
“Well yeah, but they have grocery stores there. He grew up with personal shoppers. They shopped for his groceries, his clothes, toiletries. Anyway, Mia and I have shared a Costco membership for years. But now that she lives with Jamie, I think she might break up with me.”
“Break up your Costco membership?” I clarified.
“Yeah.” She sounded so forlorn that I swallowed down the laugh that threatened to bubble out. I felt her looking at me. “If you like it, maybe we can share a membership. It doesn’t mean we have to shop together.”
“Wait, if you can bring a guest, and you guys all go together as a group, Jamie doesn’t even need his own membership, right?”
“Oh yeah. Good point.”
I was getting the feeling Charlie was pretty hung up on all the changes that would come from Mia moving in with Jamie. She was spending a lot of time thinking about it, preparing herself so she wouldn’t be blindsided, bracing herself for a hit. But from what I’d seen, Mia was as loyal and committed to their friendship as always. And I wasn’t so sure what all that talk about loneliness was about last week. Seemed like the house had people coming and going all the time. I wasn’t the only one drawn to Charlie, wanting to be around her.
“Those songs on Friday night,” Charlie said, her voice different now. Kind of solemn. No, that wasn’t it. Reverent. I gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Did you write them?”
My cheeks instantly heated. I’d always blushed like a redhead, even though my hair was dirty blond and my skin wasn’t particularly pale. “Yeah.”
I’d only performed my own music a handful of times, and always in small, impromptu situations. I didn’t want to keep it to myself forever, but I also didn’t really want to talk about it either.
“How come you don’t do that more often? Do you even know how incredible you are? Seriously, Tanner, your music is… it’s an experience. My entire body felt it.”
My neck and face were hot, and my chest swelled and ached all at once.
I didn’t know how to respond. “The band wants to learn my songs and perform them. I’ve been putting them off. It would be a big change. Weddings, for example, want covers anyway. Familiar songs to get people on the dance floor.”
“But you could get other gigs. It doesn’t have to be weddings.”
I knew that. But I didn’t want to go on tour, be on stage all the time. I wasn’t cut out to be in the public eye. “I guess I’m just a private person and I like keeping my music contained.”
“Contained?” she asked skeptically.
“I’m happy to perform once or twice a week in front of a couple hundred people. But I’m not interested in performing at huge concert venues, or making a career as a musician.”
Maybe if I didn’t have writing, I would have followed that path. But this balance worked for me. I was famous under a pen name as an author, completely anonymous to the people in my real life. To them, I was a musician, and no one outside of the Sugarville scene had ever heard of me. It worked for me. But I couldn’t explain this to Charlie. To her, all I had was music. And this job on a computer I’d mentioned last week that she hadn’t asked me about yet. I’d prepared an answer in case she did.
Needing to change the subject, I told her I’d been looking up real estate listings. “There are a few properties I want to check out. I noticed some of them are listed by your mom. Should I just reach out to her directly, or do I need my own real estate agent first? I’m new to this.”
“You can always look at properties on your own without an agent. I mean, you can even buy without an agent, but obviously I don’t recommend that. We know a lot about home values and what you should offer or negotiate for, and we know different areas of land around here, the quality of the build, which upgrades are worth paying extra dollar. Plus, all the paperwork and contracts. We know how to protect you there. So, you should get a real estate agent. I would recommend… myself.” She flashed a cheeky grin and I laughed. I’d already spent the past week considering this. If I was going to be living in her house, it made sense to work with her. It would be weird if I hired one of the other agents around here, her competition.
“But how does it work if the properties I’m interested in are listed by your mom, since she’s part of the same real estate agency as you?”
“Oh, well we have to disclose that. So you’ll have to sign something saying you understand the relationship there. It’s not ideal but it’s the way it goes in the small-town real estate biz.”
We pulled up beside the minivan in a crowded parking lot outside Costco, and I ran a hand through my hair, that trippy twilight zone feeling hitting hard. What the hell was I doing handing myself raw and exposed on a silver platter to Charlie? She’d coaxed me in, given me a sense of security.
“You ready for this?” Charlie asked as she unbuckled her seat belt. It sounded like a dare, a challenge.
“Yes.” The response was automatic, a reflex. It came from a desire to make her happy, and it succeeded in eliciting a smile. But I had a feeling I’d agreed to a lot more than a trip to Costco.
As I opened the door, a bolt of adrenaline zipped through me head to toe. All of this – from taking her on as my real estate agent, to being her roommate, and answering her questions about music as honestly as I could – it had all come from that same reflex. To get closer to her, to make her happy. The momentum was only getting stronger each time I said “Yes.” And I had no idea where it was leading me. Maybe I needed to hit pause and take the lead myself before it was too late.
Chapte
r Nine
Charlie
Tanner’s been living with me for five days, and I haven’t seen him once since move-in day. That’s right. Not once. I’m not even sure if he’s sleeping here.
In the mornings, he’s already gone. To where? I have no idea. By the time I leave for work, he’s still gone. This time of year, I don’t get home until after six or seven most nights, and the spot for his truck to park outside the house is still absent. The only way I know he actually comes home during the day is that Meatball is still here, his water bowl stays full, and he doesn’t whine at me to feed him or let him out, so Tanner must be doing it.
This is completely defeating the point of having a roommate.
It’s Friday, and I’m alternating between sips of coffee and bites of Chunky Monkey ice cream.
Donut’s lying at my feet, and I comb my toes through his fluffy fur. Mornings alone aren’t so bad. Mia often left early for work so I’m used to a quiet house as I eat breakfast. It’s night time alone that really gets me in a funk. Eating dinner alone is one thing, but then I’ve got another couple hours ahead of me before bedtime. No boyfriend to have sex with. No roommate to hang with or even to make background noise. It’s not that I couldn’t find someone to hang out with if I really wanted, but it’s not as if Sugarville has an active weekday night life. Morgan’s a teacher and gets to bed early. Grace has long shifts at the NICU in Burlington three days a week, catching up on sleep on her days off. I already hang with my friends most weekend nights. I don’t want my inability to be alone to be a burden on anyone.
I’m feeling especially mopey about all this because I really thought Tanner was becoming a friend, that this would all work out. And I don’t have much socializing to look forward to this weekend either. Morgan’s at a family wedding in southern Vermont, Mia and Jamie went to New York to visit his family, and Grace picked up an extra shift today. That means none of them will be at frisbee tonight. I’ve got lots of other friends in town, Oliver and Seth and plenty of others, but those core friends are my pillars. They hold me up. They’re my foundation, I guess. At least there’s Brew Fest tomorrow, and Grace might be up for going with me.
